Oxford
professor Niall Ferguson has attracted considerable attention, and not
merely for his ambitious histories of the Rothschild banking dynasty, the
First World War and, now, the history of money and power over the past
three hundred years in his new book, The Cash Nexus. In the British
press, Ferguson has made the front page for having done all of this at
thirty-six, after a career as a popular “right-wing” journalist, and while
looking far too good and being far too well-dressed. A recent Guardian
profile begins: “I think I may hate Niall Ferguson.” A reputedly huge advance
from Penguin for his next three books, as well as a documentary t.v. series
in the offing, have only turned up the volume on the kind of spiteful coverage
for which the British press is famous.

In person,
Ferguson is certainly as well-dressed as advertised, and handsome, in a
British way: In the movie, he’d be played by Colin Firth. At the end of
a long day of interviews, he gratefully orders a pint of lager in the hotel
bar and reflects on his press at home.

“I’ve discovered
that in Britain the book reviews aren’t what matters; the profiles are
what matters. The profiles are dominated by questions which seem to go
in this order: the size of the advance; physical appearance and then age;
and then what his wife does. Of course, it’s ludicrous because, firstly,
this endless droning on about the advance has the Chinese whisper effect
of increasing the actual amount of money involved, so that I wish I could
earn as much as the newspapers say I earn -- I’d be able to retire and
never write another book.

The
Cash Nexus contains two controversial assertions. The argument that
inspired the book was an attempt by Ferguson to question economic triumphalism,
a contemporary myth that insists that, after the collapse of communism,
it’s blatantly apparent that economic imperatives direct history. On the
left, it’s considered an affirmation of the essential correctness of Marx,
in spite of the fate of Soviet Russia. On the right, it’s a philosophy
that justifies weak government, deregulation, and transnational trade agreements.
The irony is that in opposing this notion, Ferguson - a onetime Thatcherite
- is in agreement with “leftist” economic writers like Linda McQuaig.

“I suppose
the book is trying to show that there are different ways of explaining
the relationship between economics and politics. One of them is Marx’s
idea, and then there are more modern, late 20th-century ideas like ‘elections
are always decided by the economy’ and the general assumptions that all
of us almost casually make that everything can be explained by some proximate
economic cause, which is an almost reassuring, subtle conspiracy theory
that offers a cynical explanation of all events.

Ferguson’s
other accusation is that America, the imperial world power of today, is
guilty of “understretch” in its foreign policy, a giant seemingly terrified
of exercising its considerable might abroad, for the good of everyone concerned.

“It may
not be politically what people want to hear, but historically I think somebody
had to say it. If you have globalization, but the global hegemon just says:
‘Goodbye, we’re going under our nuclear defense shield, the rest of you
can go to hell!’, that seems to me just indefensible. If North American
culture has any pretensions, whether it’s Christian or liberal in its values,
it surely has some concern about the rest of the world’s population, who
are very poor and very, very wretched, and live in terrible political circumstances.”

Ferguson
is a proponent of a kind of historical parlour game he calls “virtual history”,
and has edited a book of the same name, which proposes historical what-ifs
like “What if the Nazis invaded Britain?” and “What if JFK had lived?”
His last book, The Pity of War, asserts that the war, and the subsequent
misery of the 20th century, might have been avoided if Britain had stayed
neutral. He’s a fan of chaos theory, and celebrates the ability of history
to sustain paradoxes, such as globalization in the face of ethnic nationalism.

“I love
that phrase ‘the untied nations’, which seemed to capture what was going
on in the last twenty years. It’s a paradox that the world is getting more
integrated economically, and more disintegrated politically. Where does
that end - in every little state being ethnically homogenous? It seems
highly unlikely. But some people dearly believe that’s the direction we’re
going. If it’s true, then economically it’s going to be very difficult
because there are diseconomies of scale in having umpteen little statelets,
all economically homogenous, all with their own little governments and
their own border guards. It doesn’t make economic sense, ergo it’s not
one nice upward slope here. There are - oh dear, I sound like a Marxist
- contradictions in the process of globalization.

“Indeed,”
he says, slyly, “a lot of people cope with standardization of the the economic
world by retreating into a particularly chauvinistic nationalism. You don’t
need to look too far in Canada to see examples of this. It’s so paradoxical
to have a summit about integrating all the trade in the Americas, and there
you have the leader of the host city hanging up little Quebecois flags
to make the point that he is, what was it again? ‘A northern latino nation.’
A fine example of the story I’m telling.”